Re: Re: RE: Enron's Success Story

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Perelman" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 4:02 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:20935] Re: RE: Enron's Success Story


> Is it ever possible to the disprove market efficiency to the
satisfaction
> of a conservative economist?

===========

Nope.

What I find interesting about the Journal ed. and JD's reply is the
'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' approach is missing
from the former and hinted at by the latter, yet not taken too far in
the direction of the ex ante perspective I thought lefties were
supposed to be pretty good at identifying. Stronger supply side
constraints on the capacity to defraud other market players would cede
territory to ethicists, which, it seems, many economists are loathe to
do. If I remember right Daniel Hausman's essay 'Are Markets Morally
Free Zones?' goes into some of the problems of that 'nature'. The
refusal to criminalize such white collar behavior exhibits not only
the usual class bias, but something a little more disconcerting to
those who would be desirous of dumping the current system; we have no
substantive capacity to predict that agents would be more honest if we
can't come up with something better than a bunch of 'thou shalt not
misinform' penalties.

Ian